


The Fire and the Place in the Forest

by strange_Selkie



Category: Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass - Sonya Taaffe
Genre: F/F, Jews with Guns?, Original Character(s), Partisans, WWII, Yiddish, Yuletide Treat, hfn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27356677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_Selkie/pseuds/strange_Selkie
Summary: Somewhere in a forest, somewhere in Poland, December 1942: Chaye Roznatovsky (who will someday meet a demon) meets a wolf.See endnotes for Yiddish glossary.
Relationships: Chaye Roznatovsky/OFC
Comments: 13
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Fire and the Place in the Forest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



The pickle barrel was frozen halfway down. Chaye tried not to think how cold it was, that salt brine should start to freeze; she pushed with the heels of her hands, and then her knuckles, at the ice to break it, and she tried not to think about breakfast.

“Are you that hard up for a fight?” The person who asked was holding a rifle stock without its barrel. Chaye would have said _she_ , at home, but here it only mattered _can shoot_ or _can’t._

Before Chaye found anything to answer, the butt of the broken-down gun landed, hard, on the frost-feathered surface between them. Slush spouted upward. To the shifting layers of camp-smells — wood smoke, wood rot, blood and sweat — a sharp note of pickle was added.

“Thanks—”

“Velvl.”

“Wolf, that’s your _name_?” A boy’s name, before, resting now on someone with dark hair cropped short, a man’s four corner fringes beside the pistol and cartridge box at their hips, and enough sense to pad their rifle sling between their breasts.

“It’s name enough? Mietek calls me _Sniper._ ” Velvl the sniper had sort of nice eyes, a soft hazel, and they had gone up, down, and over Chaye’s field jacket and trousers swift as sunrise. Not crudely, but not hiding interest — there was no helping some fools, but all right — and not hedging questions; no one here had that kind of time.

“Yeah; Mietek calls me _vilde-Chaye,_ I try not to pasken by him.” Chaye did not put her hand out, covered in frozen brine. “Chaye Roznatovsky.”

“I’d give you my name if you needed to remember it. Just Velvl.”

“He knew me at home, before. I’m not particularly — I was a fast runner, once. That’s all.” Chaye had never flirted with a person over a pickle barrel, in a wood or on a proper street, and this was going shit-sidewise even for late 1942. Possibly it was the tangle of their Yiddish, her own easy as music, Velvl’s schoolroom crisp and clipped; possibly weeks of Yom Kippur feasting had left them both lightheaded. She swallowed hard, shoved back her falling-all-ways braid, and tried to talk like someone she had been, lyceum-smart and sane.

“ _Er, es, zi,_ or _zey_ , please? I find it wastes time to guess.”

Velvl looked quizzical at _he,_ and shoulders had gone tightly back at _it,_ but there was a half-smile for Chaye just the same. “ _She_ still works. What do you do, Chaye Roznatovsky?”

“I run,” she answered. “Toward, usually. And shoot Germans before they shoot me, God willing.”

***

It was the first rule of the evening fire: _don’t talk about food._ There had been broth, tonight, with black radishes in it; but Chaye was dizzy, an hour past dark, and Lolek was swishing his idiot tongue about _cake._

She had adored her mother’s once-a-year cake, its honey and spices, its sugar-dark oranges carefully overlaid. _Mamaleh_ , _I’m so sorry,_ her mother’s face now far from Chaye’s memory as the taste of oranges. Her own face, here, now, must have twisted; Velvl’s arms went around Chaye’s waist.

_That’s interesting_ , thought Chaye, up in her head or aloud. For three weeks of bone-cold monotony Velvl had asked for nothing, suggested nothing, neither offered nor taken. She seemed to subsist on hot water — they would never run short of snow — and silence, and if she was often on Chaye’s side of the fire with her cleaning rod and her patchbox, well, it wasn’t a _big_ camp, and quiet was a good way to stay alive.

“Lalka, you fucking bore,” said Velvl, to be heard over the flames.

“Maybe I’m talking about food. Maybe I’m not!”

Lolek was telling a story, Chaye realized, in the half-dream of hunger, only the story of the miser and the cake, telling it with the double-loops and the verbal scrolls of a real badkhan’s son. The beggar in the road, and the dining-room of demons: all ridiculous, in this dark forest, all tilted upside-down. Fuck charity and fuck paradise, any of them would have cried to eat cake off the pavement, without brushing it off or sharing.

The stars and the trees had stopped spinning. Her head was down, somehow, on Velvl’s shoulder. This was — _interesting, no, this is stupid, vilde-Chaye_...

Velvl had gone steady-still, not her usual tolerance for stupid, and her heart was ticking fast and near. There was nothing they could give one another in kind for kindness, not even bread. Nothing to make the hours pass safely, nothing to outlast winter firelight.

It was a hell of a time to do nothing. Chaye got her angle wrong, the first time, and kissed Velvl’s cheek just aside the corner of her mouth; Velvl was the one to fix things. She brought a cupped hand to Chaye’s face, not hesitant, just slow, and kissed her as if they’d done it _before_. Back-bedroom kisses, picture-house kisses, fine for their time, not meant for this place. Chaye pulled back and nipped Velvl’s earlobe and she cursed, adorable, old-fashioned, _heck._

“You okay, zissele?”

Velvl stared. A shiver went through her — Chaye felt it as her own, where their bodies touched — and she turned suddenly away.

“Oh. That’s your name. It _is_ , isn’t it.” Chaye grinned, delighted, as a blush flicked over Velvl’s cheeks. “I was just… calling you that.”

Velvl _hauled_ on her, not slow or polite, her half-gloved hands firm in Chaye’s hair, fingertips cold and her kiss all heat and breath and teeth. Chaye felt taken apart fully-clothed. She reached blind for Velvl’s collar button, all she dared in this weather; traced between shirt, undershirt, and arbe-kanfes until the chill was gone from her own skin. Her fingers were clumsy, cracked with cold, maybe she’d forgotten…

_Not forgotten how._ She went lightly over Velvl’s collarbone, just learning its line for herself. Up to her shoulder, past a thick, fragile scar, and over muscles that lay in knots from sleeplessness and rifle drill. Velvl leaned into her touch with the smallest, sweetest sound, as if Chaye had done something good and worth doing, and someone whistled.

“Don’t stop on our account!”

Chaye had been half in Velvl’s lap; when she turned, the firelight was sharp as the end of a dream. Lionel Szymkowicz wanted a punch in the nose, and she meant to take off her gloves and do him the favor —

“Don’t gawk at what’s not yours, Lalka.” No one was going to argue with a sharpshooter. “Sorry,” she whispered to Chaye, “Sorry, I didn’t mean...” 

“Thanks, but it’s not getting back to my mother. And if my knowing your name makes you want to rail me against a tree —”

“We don’t… have that one at home,” stammered Velvl. Her hands were under the straps and buckles of Chaye’s jacket; her mind and her kissed-red mouth conjugated the verb. “…Against a _tree_?”

***

Chaye couldn’t remember who’d taught her to wrap her puttees with dry straw in them past the snow line, or how she’d learned to belt down sacks under her field jacket, for a free hand until the sacks were needed, and for keeping out the wind. She recalled quite well when she’d started making the forage runs alone: once they had no spare lives to risk with hers.

She was quick enough. She was strong enough, still. The Nowieckis’ farm — they’d known her father, tried to help them — lay a safe distance from any village, but if anyone spoke to Chaye her Polish was accentless, clean, and she could lie like a demon.

That was nothing she’d brought from home.

“Need a rifle?”

Chaye, startled, felt for hers as if it might have leapt off her back.

“I meant, one to go with you.”

She felt like a jumped-up Girl Guide between broad-shouldered Mietek Szymkowicz and Velvl, who had wool _valenki_ to keep her feet warm and a Russian soldier’s quilted coat under her leather one. That they might have come from the same target crossed her mind just ahead of _no, it’s safer in here than out there._

“It’s only the groceries.” Chaye shrugged. “Shouldn’t we save you for blowing something up?”

“We blowing anything up before tea time, Szymka?”

“Nah. I’ve nothing to wear. What says _grenades and railway bridges_ in this cold?” He turned, in the frozen mud, as if his army overcoat were mink, and then he turned up something that was not the grocery money.

It was chocolate, a bar of real chocolate the size of Chaye’s open hand, its glossy red-and-cream wrapper lettered in gold. Until Mietek stuck it in her chest pocket, she stared at it like a trick, like food from the other world, destined to go to sand when she bit in.

“Something to walk on.” Mietek shoved her in the shoulder. “Take the wolf. They have wolves too.”

Dazed from white snow, black trees, and walking farther than belief, Chaye nearly missed the little river that told her _halfway_. The water was slow and quiet, and dry snow had blown in little banks out on the ice. Velvl, breaking path for them, found it with a shout.

“We ought to,” Chaye could not quite put her voice to _walk through_. “In case. Dogs.”

“Not in those boots.”

“Mietek always says to—”

“Then he can get the groceries.” Velvl took her by the left wrist and right hip, like a Lindy Hop with rifles in the way, and Chaye was so charmed and confused and _warm,_ she missed the moment her boots left the ground. 

The stream was no more than a meter across, and she landed on her feet; impossible to say why she stood and swayed a minute, gazing down at glints in the leaf-choked ice.

“Chayele, did you see something? You’re giving me nerves.”

“No! No. I’ve never had luck like that.” Chaye broke the ice with her boot, bent forward and splashed her face.

Velvl, on the opposite bank, did the same, but she gasped with laughter when she did; she looked up with her cheeks gone red from the wintry water. “Oh, that’s awful! Keeps you awake, though.”

“Does it get so cold where you came from? You don’t talk like Warsaw, or Lodz.”

“No. Yes. Yes, cold, no, not from here. Vilna — I walked here with Rokhl Davidovitz, she’s a medic now in the family camp.”

They were both silent a while. Their own camp, twenty or thirty souls who could fight on the move, steal and bargain at the treeline, and fade from sight with half an orchard in their pockets, starved one week over the other. What were a thousand women and children eating, so deep in the forest? 

“It’s different, Vilna,” Velvl said, just before their mouths might have frozen shut. “Mostly grand people — or university people—”

“In a ghetto now too, yes?”

“Yes. Or the forest — one of my brothers—” She rocked forward in her boots, as if something had gotten her in the stomach, and had to swallow before she spoke again. “Perel said we’re all artists and queers, at home, but we’ll fight to the death if we have to.”

“Well, I’m only a queer, not an artist, and I want to stay alive.”

“Oh, _you’ll_ make it. One thing, you’re too pretty to die.”

Chaye flicked ice-water at Velvl and rolled her eyes.

Velvl caught her hand, and held it until warmth returned. You couldn’t read someone’s palm in half-gloves, but she looked a little like that: fierce-focused and looking inward all at once. “And another thing, _Chaye_ , life. Names are important. They mean things.”

“Is that why you hide yours?”

“I don’t _like_ mine,” Velvl corrected. “My siblings, of blessed memory, had fine names. _Zissele Aronowicz_!”

“It’s not the worst name.” Chaye stretched, brushed her knees, and held out her hand for Velvl to step through the icy stream.

The Nowieckis’ farmhouse was within a stand of poplars, all heavy now with mistletoe; their land ran down to the lane just out of sight, and the lane followed the river to a village, but they were not the kind to visit or take visitors. Chaye never stayed long — she would never put them in such danger — but there was always warm water for washing, fresh bread from the tiled oven and sour-cherry juice from the cellar, wishniak for the long walk back, if she wanted. They were her father’s friends, but her mother had been the first to bring her here, three years ago. _You remember our Chaye, who won the cross-country. No, she won’t pass, not even with bleach in the hair, but she has luck, she’ll be fine, no, we couldn’t stay._

Velvl flung herself down in a snowbank like taking a parlor chaise, snugged her rifle and her elbows into a drift, checked her scope, and scowled.

“Give me your rifle. Scope’s fogged; too cold.” That Velvl could gripe just fine in a whisper, Chaye was not surprised; that she checked her pistol and held it out in exchange, Chaye was. She handed over her 91/30 with the old ghost-ring sights. Velvl put a bit of snow in her mouth, closed her eyes after a long, slow blink, and brought her shot in line with the farmhouse door before opening them.

“It’s not right,” Chaye realized, loudly enough to startle and press her glove over her mouth.

“...Th’ shot?” Velvl frowned at her, eyes up on the hollow of Chaye’s throat, not to ruin them with the snow.

“The house.” As she watched, the curl of smoke from the chimney thinned, faded, and did not return. “I don’t hear… I don’t hear _anything_. They have three children!”

“Do they have a truck? Someone did, since two days ago when it snowed.”

“No.” Even with her hand angled over her eyes, Chaye couldn’t see broken-white against smooth snow. “Only a cart.”

“Would you _get down_!” Velvl tugged left-handed at Chaye’s belt, unbalancing her, sending snow up her back. “So, that’s a trap.”

“A trap full of food!” Chaye rolled onto her elbows. From Velvl’s snowbank she could see a line of darkness where the front door stood ajar. Hanging in the thatch above it was a wind-toy made of broken bottleglass, a charm to please children: gems danced on the snow, amber-emerald-blue. The pretty lights were all that moved; there was no _life_ , not a single sound from the chickens or the pigs. “It’s dark in two hours. Next house’s three miles, and I don’t know what I could steal. Please just cover me, please.”

“Chaye.” There were about a thousand sounds in the one word, and then Velvl drew a breath as if she’d been hurt — but she was only fitting more closely to the snow, rib cage, hips, knees all aligned with her target. She pulled her own rifle into close reach, as if she might need ten chances at a three-room house.

“Velvl…”

“You have cover on the front door. Left window, side window.” She twitched her left fingers, to follow her words. “Not the back room, not the cellar, this is such a shit idea.”

It was, but Chaye was already running. When she looked back, from the farmhouse fence as she leapt over, she saw no trace of Velvl the sniper at all.

She knew how to take a door, in silence and shielded by the door itself; she knew, with her heart in her mouth, the farmhouse was empty of anything living. She nearly wasted a round from Velvl’s Luger all the same, when ten, twenty half-wild dark eyes gazed back into hers: the mirror over the washbasin, just inside the door, had already been shattered with a bullet.

Everything that could be destroyed was flung from its shelf, smashed or punctured. Pillow feathers and cooking fat made a trail like snow into the back bedroom, and the house was cold enough Chaye might have believed it. Someone had dragged the kitchen fire half out of the hearth; its last embers slid from dull orange to darkness as she watched. The rye loaves, the cabbages, everything meant to weigh her down on the way home lay in a wreck. The family soup pot and the dishpan were heaped against the oven: lye-soap and lentils and a pork bone. She was hungry — _you are starving, you are here not to starve_ — she was terrified, and she had to move, this was not a twirl through Piotrkowska market. Some things were left, the cupboard lock bayoneted but not truly bothered with, a few tins of fish on the floor too sturdy for harm. And in three years’ occupation, no Nazi had ever climbed behind a farmhouse stove.

God knew she had stolen, looted shops at home and dug turnips on the road, but this felt wrong, the air itself felt wrong, and as she hustled the few unbroken bottles and whole tins into a potato-sack Chaye dared not, dared not look further into the house.

“Chaye!”

She did not, thank all her luck, put a pistol on Velvl; her hands were shaking too hard. “You’re not where I left you.” Her voice shook, too.

“Tell me you cleared the house.” Velvl gazed at the ceiling. “Safety off the pistol, please — no, you know what, safety on.” She was still carrying Chaye’s rifle, slinging her own though it was by miles the better one, and it was strange to watch her move with it — even the two or three steps that put the rest of the house in her sights.

“Stay there, ah, hell, _dayan h’emes,_ ” Velvl raised her left hand and sketched a quick cross on the air. “You don’t need to look, Chayele.”

“No, but I do, but what if —”

“A man, a woman, three schoolboys, two dogs.”

Chaye nodded.

“They did what they could.” Velvl spared a second to thumb the tears from Chaye’s cheek, and with the same hand took the poor sack she’d half filled. “Let’s please fuck off.”

“We can’t leave with nothing. There’ll be stuff in the cellar — they won’t have left a man in the cellar! — and the dead don’t eat.”

The table was not in its usual place in the kitchen. Chaye had to brace and shove to move it, and one heavy leg beam caught at the crack in the floor where the cellar door had warped. Velvl kept the rifle trained on the trapdoor, though it was bolted, even when Chaye swore and struggled with the bolt.

Even without a light, they could see every corner of the tiny cellar. Ropes of onions, potato baskets, turnip bins and pickle barrels, earth-colored lumps held up off the earth on bricks and boards.

Then Chaye screamed, in this house full of death, and something screamed back.

“Sheydim,” Velvl whispered.

They were small ghosts, bone-white with dust, bone-thin and ragged. Their eyes were huge as spirits’ eyes were meant to be, a clear grey with thick, dark-golden lashes, and their hair might be golden, too, under all the dust. One might be a girl, and one might be a boy — not from the rags on their bodies, but from the pale braid one of them wore — and if they were real, alive, they weren’t above ten years old.

“Don’t shoot,” one of the ghosts said, in Polish, in a voice that cracked and soared from long disuse.

“Polish kids.” The rifle was up on Velvl’s right shoulder. Her left hand was bending the bolt.

Chaye jumped down the ladder, though the Nowieckis’ cellar was not the grave she might have chosen. “Knock it off. Why the hell would Polish kids hide in the dirt, my brothers have blond hair!”

“All right then, vi heystu, kinderlech?”

Chaye flinched, to hear _wie heißt du_ in a posh accent at the end of a rifle, and she couldn’t look at Velvl. The maybe-boy kept his mouth shut and shook, but the maybe-girl answered, in Polish, “ _Niewiem, niewiem!_ ”

“She answered you! They understand! Zissele, enough!” 

“They might have heard it from —”

“Yes. Exactly.” Chaye showed her teeth, and Velvl at least bit her lip and lowered her eyes, but not the weapon. “Point at cabbages, please. Potatoes. Turnips. It’s no excuse, but Tante Velvl runs twitchy.” There was no laziness in her Yiddish; she could speak as finely as Velvl herself, and as she did, the children pointed. Chaye trundled them up the cellar steps after the carrots, potatoes, and turnips; she took less than she might have, but she had other things to carry.

“We have to leave them here, are you crazy, we can’t take them back, we need to get _out_ —”

“Damek,” the boy said, in the borrowed accent of someone whose Yiddish meant his death. Then he pointed to his sister and said, correctly, “Chava.”

“Hell-damned motherfucking cholera and _Jesus_.”

“Not leaving them.” Chaye stood still and said nothing more until Velvl lowered her rifle.

“Adam and Eve don’t have shoes, Chayele _._ Are we going to carry them?”

“Yes.”

***

“What’d you bring us?”

“Cabbages. Potatoes.” It was all Chaye could say. Her knees went, before anyone could help her, but it wasn’t the tenth time she’d landed in muddy snow that day.

“Bad news,” Velvl countered. “And mouths to feed.” She wore her rifle carried forward, the little boy on her back; the girl, with her feet wrapped in Chaye’s puttees, was balanced on her hip.

“Oy, take them up the road. We don’t have enough tents as it is!”

“Children! And before the wedding!”

“Fuck all the way off with weddings, Szymka.”

“Easy, easy, haven’t you asked her, Velvl?”

“Ask me what?” Chaye was rubbing her neck, where the sacks had bitten in, and breathing slow around a headache.

“Sniper’s waiting to talk to your father.”

“...My father’s —”

“I think we need a big bowl for that.”

“A silver knife.”

“A sheep.”

It was about then Chaye lost the plot. She dropped flat in the mud by the fire; there was nothing left in her but one breath, then another, then another. Mietek bent and brushed the crown of her head — _I’m sorry, Chayele, for the Nowieckis_ — but when she tried to speak, it didn’t work, and when she put her forearm over her eyes he walked away. Hirshel set a piece of black bread on her chest like a sin-eater’s ration. Lolek kept to whatever Lolek was doing, on the far side of the fire, and Velvl had already gone, a child by each hand, without glancing back.

She woke hours later, shivering and burning, with the taste of salt and chocolate in her mouth. It was the last thing she’d eaten — midday, when both children were crying, behind their trembling teeth. Maybe Velvl had been crying, too, but Velvl had taken point.

_They had clothed Eve and Adam, in the Nowiecki boys’ jumpers and trousers from a chest in the front room, but there were no spare shoes. It meant a long walk made slow, and Chaye had forgotten about Mietek’s chocolate. The third time a birch tree bent and shuddered its gown of snow onto them, Chaye had fallen hard enough to feel its outline in her pocket, and barely shaken free before snapping off squares and handing them around._

_What_ is _it, the boy said, and while his sister explained, Velvl helped Chaye onto her feet._

_I fucked up. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have, I’m sorry._

_You fucked up, let’s leave it here. We have enough to carry._

_She kissed Velvl’s wolf-sharp cheekbone, where a branch had stung hard enough to make her bleed, and maybe, maybe this wasn’t impossible, maybe in thirty years Adam and Eve, the brother and sister Nobody who’d been bolted into a cellar to save them, would tell stories of Auntie Chaye and Auntie Wolf._

“Chaye, Chayele, don’t wander off on me. Please.”

She felt the words as much as heard them. Her head was on Velvl’s lap — the pad of muscle gave way to a knee, if she stirred too far — and a gentle hand was stroking through her hair.

“Not a real fever,” Mietek said, from away above. “Dehydrated.” 

The only word Chaye knew with that sound was in a story, and if her muscles had all turned to nine or ten snakes, she’d believe it.

“Here. Make her drink.”

“—Make her do anything,” she caught part of Velvl’s answer, and the hand that had been so gentle was pulling at her shoulder. “Come on, baby, sit up.”

“Call me that and it’s _Zissele,_ ” Chaye coughed. “ _Zissele_ every time.”

Velvl shrugged, a quick rise and settle of her breast under Chaye’s forehead. The thin rolled edge of a tin bottle met Chaye’s lips, spruce tea like the memory of lemon, and she made a small grateful sound but all she wanted, really, was to go back to sleep.

“I’m not washing your jacket,” said Velvl. “The mud’s all that’s holding it up.”

Someone had taken it off her, then. Her shirt was threadbare, worthless, she ought to be freezing faster than she was. Chaye pulled her wrists higher into the sleeves, tucked her head down toward the collar of whatever she _was_ wearing, and found it was the sniper’s quilted coat.

“I talked to Itsik Frenkel, he’s running food to the family camp. He knows a farmer who’ll sell to us — outside Młynarze.”

“Mm.”

“Can you get us there?”

“Yeah. Two days, though,” Chaye warned, and wanted to stay, held safe and sleep-drunk, with Velvl rubbing slow circles just where a muscle was on fire at her hip.

“Are you just… refusing to be awake?”

“Trying, yeah.” She had to gulp from the tea bottle again; her voice had gone to rust. “Awake hurts.”

“I’ll say the rest later, then.”

Chaye opened her eyes. The trees were swaying, the sky was clean twilight blue, and Velvl looked like hell. She had stuck her head in a snowbank or under water, so her hair spiked up short, then shoved her hands through that so many times, it really looked like a wolf’s dark ruff. Without a mark on her, she seemed as beaten up as Chaye felt. She’d walked two miles further, to the family camp, no doubt under the weight of one child, then the other — and two miles back, Chaye realized, when Velvl could have passed the night with a ration of soup and Rokhl Davidovitz.

“I’m listening.”

“You were right — you _did_ right, today. It matters, and I’m sorry.”

“We talked…” 

“I know, but it’s important. I wasn’t thinking. The one armed has to be the one thinking.”

“Well said,” Chaye gave it to her.

“And I’m sorry the boys—” 

Chaye looked for them, when Velvl did, but they seemed all to have fucked unusually far off.

“I’m sorry they said those things. About your father, of blessed memory, about… a wedding.”

“Why didn’t _you_ say anything?”

“Chayele! What could I say? _‘I have, let’s see, half a tent I share with Hirshel Rasseyner, there’s ten thousand_ _Reichsmarks_ _on my head, I know it’s a bad time, be mine, just a little bit, before I die’_?”

It hurt her in places she’d feel for a week, but Chaye held on to her, tight. “Yes. Yeah. Beautiful, brilliant, fine by me.”

**Author's Note:**

> \---- a small glossary of Yiddish and other terms ---- 
> 
> pasken by: to trust the authority/judgement of. 
> 
> badkhan: a professional storyteller, social connector, and preserver of oral tradition. 
> 
> Zissele: Sweetie, a proper name and a thing you call a person 
> 
> Arbe-kanfes: from Hebrew arba-kanfot, four corners, a tallit katan -- an undergarment with tzitzit, fringes, usually worn at the time only by observant Jewish men. Velvl's belonged to one of her brothers, but she wouldn't wear it if she didn't take the observance seriously. 
> 
> Puttees: leg wraps worn as a unifying top layer over boots, socks/stockings, and trousers 
> 
> Valenki: wool-felt boots worn under a waterproof outer boot: state of the art for 1942
> 
> Dayan h’emes: from baruch dayan ha-emes, "Blessed be the righteous judge," said when acknowledging a death. 
> 
> vi heystu? What's your name? Yiddish. 
> 
> wie heißt du: what's your name?, German informal. 
> 
> Niewiem: Polish for no one, unknown, I don't know. 
> 
> Lionel/Lolek/Lalka and [Michael]/Mietek/Szymka: because why would a language have only one diminutive variant per name? Why would anyone live that way? These two are vaguely based on the Bielski brothers. 
> 
> Thank you to Sonya Taaffe for lending me the keys, and to my beta readers To Be Announced.


End file.
